The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  I sat there with my face hanging out and wished she’d say, Well, it ain’t all bad, actually some is rather good, Shorty, and I loved where the dude cuts down the tree and the bear bites him in the throat, but of course a sweetheart isn’t going to tell you that, their critical ability is not what attracts them to us in the first place.

  She was the prettiest woman I ever knew in my life, the sweetest, the kindest. I discovered that Amaryllis was Leonora’s china pattern too. She had four place settings, as I did. Together, we’d have eight. It was tempting to consider marriage. And yet she had a way of keeping me on a short rope—she’d look at me and say, “What are you thinkin?” Nuthin, I’d say, nuthin in particular. “What is it?” she’d ask. I don’t care to talk about it, I’d say. “Silence is a form of anger,” she said. “A person can be just as aggressive with silence as they can be with a gun.”

  Oh for crying out loud, dear God of mercy, I cried, and jumped up and went straight to the barroom, not the Lazy Dollar but the Dirty Dog Saloon, and sat in a dim corner and had a stiff drink and then another to keep the first one company, and by and by, who should mosey in but Mr. Higley, author of numerous western songs, including “Goin Back to Colorado” and “How I Miss the Old Missouri,” so I bought him a drink and me one too and said, “Tell me how it is that you love it so out here on the plains. You write poems about the beauty of the land and the goodness of the folks—what am I missing, pardner?”

  He said, “I have not set foot in Colorado in forty years, nor seen the Missouri for thirty-seven. Does that answer your question, L.S.?”

  We hoisted a number of drinks then, and I staggered back home about midnight and slept on the porch swing, the door being locked, and the next morning Leonora and I had a tiff. She said, “How come you go do a dumb thing like that, Leonard? Can you imagine how it makes me feel? Or do you think I don’t notice that you got drunk and were walkin around this town singin and whoopin and ropin street lamps and laughin like an idiot at two in the morning? Do you think that decent people don’t talk about this and wonder why you’re not home here with me? Don’t you see that it makes me look like a fool?”

  I said, “If I have got to ask permission to take a drink, then let me out of it. I quit.”

  She said, “Don’t you see there’s a pattern in your life, Leonard? You’re someone who avoids conflict. It’s what makes you a cowboy.”

  “You’re mad at me, ain’tcha,” I said. She was mad.

  “I’m not mad. Only concerned. We have a dysfunctional relationship, that’s all.”

  “You’re mad and you’re always going to be mad,” I said.

  She said she had read an article in the Emporia Gazette that said male restlessness may result from a hormone imbalance caused by an eating disorder.

  “That’s the westward impulse you’re talking about, Leonora! That’s what brought us here!” I cried. She said it wasn’t an impulse, it was an imbalance. She said, “Maybe you should get help. The schoolmarm is a therapist part-time, you know.”

  Okay, I said.

  Twice a week for eight weeks, I lay down on Mary Ellen Henry’s parlor sofa and told her everything about myself. She used cats as a medium. (She explained why, but I forget.) A cat lies on your chest and you talk to it, and she listens, e.g.:

  ME: Boy, I sure feel confused, Puff. I’m so sad and mixed up I could go get drunk and jump off the roof. But with my luck I’d probably miss the ground.

  HER: Puff, you tell that nice man to tell you more about when his mama left him at the train depot and went off with the dry goods salesman.

  It felt dumb but I did it. Lay on the couch, cat stretched out on my chest, Mary Ellen sat in the rocker, I talked about Mama to the cat—“My mother was the saintliest woman who ever trod this earth, Puff, and my daddy was the meanest sumbitch ever drew breath”—and Mary Ellen said to the cat, “Puff, I want you to tell Lonesome Shorty that some people might say that riding the open range is a cowboy’s only way of keeping that powerful mama at a distance. You tell him that, Puff, and see what he says.”

  “Why, Puff, I believe that is the biggest crock of horse poop I’ve heard yet,” I replied.

  “Puff,” she said, “remind Shorty of how his mama ran his daddy off so she could control her boy better.”

  “Lies, Puff. You’re lying, ya miserable cat.”

  And on it went. I gave it my best shot but was no good at therapy, and one morning I said, “I’ve decided that you’ve probably done as much for me as you possibly can, Puff, so this will be my last visit. Thank you.”

  Mary Ellen was stunned, as if I had slapped her. Her eyes welled up with tears. “How can you do this to me?” she cried. “Don’t you realize that you’re my only client? You’re important to me, Shorty! How can you walk away from me like I was just your hitching rail?”

  This was much too complicated for me. So I saddled up and without a word to Leonora I rode off down the trail toward the Bitterroot, feeling dumber than dirt. Couldn’t bear to be alone, couldn’t bear the company. Thought it might be due to a lack of fluoride. Or it could be genetic—it’s hard to tell. My daddy left home when I was two. If we had any fluoride, he took it with him.

  Rode seven days through Arapaho country and was full of loneliness and misery, thinking only of Leonora, her touch and smell, until finally I began to sing “Mi amor, mi corazón,” and burst into tears and turned around and rode back to Pit City. A bitterly cold day, windy, snow flurries, and me without shoes—I’d forgotten them at a campsite—and I was a sorry sight, but when Euphonia saw me she said, “Welcome back, honey, and come in and let me get you a pair of Bill’s shoes.”

  I took a shower, and the towels were soft and smelled lemony. Had split-pea soup and Leonora came home and hugged me and cried, and the next day I got a job at the stagecoach office as assistant director of customer service and group sales, and the next few days went along like a song. Euphonia made my breakfast and Leonora made my bed and I bought six new place settings of Amaryllis, and we made plans to marry.

  Then the Chautauqua put on a play called The Secret Forest of the Heart that Leonora had a big part in, so I went and I hated it, it was the dumbest sheep-dip show you ever saw, about good women who nurture and heal and men who rob and control, and Leonora held out a magical garland of flowers and vines and herbs and celery and sang, “Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.” People with big wet eyes stood and clapped and a stagecoach driver named Gabby turned to me and said, “I could sure use a big hug right now.” I got out of there as fast as I could.

  I told Leonora, “You hate me ’cause I walked out on yer dagnabbed play and you’re going to give me my walkin papers, ain’tcha?” and she said, no, she wasn’t, she didn’t expect me to like the play, she knew me well enough to know that, and I said, “Oh, there you go again, just like always, you never stop finding fault with me, so I might as well go be bad, there’s no percentage in being good,” and she said I was crazy. “Well, to hell with you,” I said, and I got so mad, I went in and robbed the bank. Pulled my hat down low and went in with six-guns in hand and yelled, “Everybody facedown on the floor! Nice and easy, now, and nobody gets hurt.”

  They said, “Why are you doing this, Shorty? You’re a wonderful guy and have a good job and you’re blessed with the love of a wonderful woman.”

  “If that’s what you call blessed, then I’d like to try damned to hell for a while.”

  “What do you have to be mad about?” asked the lady teller.

  “Doggone it, I can be mad if I want to be. If I say I’m mad, I mean I’m mad.”

  “You’ll never get away with it,” someone yelled as I rode away with $34,000 on me, and as it turned out, they were right, but I didn’t know it yet.

  I headed off across the sandy flats on
Old Dan toward the big mesas, rode hard for a week, then lay back. I was rich, and lonesome as an old galoot. Wanted to hook up with a partner but then thought of the trouble involved and decided against it. Made up a song as I rode along, “Livin inside / I’m dissatisfied / Guess I’m qualified to ride.” Rode to Big Gap. No family took me in, no woman offered me comfort, and I sought no solace in the church. I paid with cash. A man in a saloon said he knew my old partner Eugene. “He got bit by his horse and was laid up with gelding fever and had fits and hallucinations and talked a blue streak for a month before he died, mostly about economics,” he told me. I was sorry I had not been there to see it.

  I rode on. I tried not to think about Leonora but I missed her terribly.

  I wished I knew how to patch things up but there’s no way. The love between two people is fragile and one false move can break it like fine china, and when it breaks, it’s broken. I rode on, but I rode slower, and after a while I felt sick. I was so lonely. I lay down in the dirt and wrapped myself in a blanket and lay shivering all night and woke up in the morning and—I was about thirty feet from the Colorado Trail! All these wagon trains were going by and now and then a pioneer or a gold prospector’d call over to me—“Howdy! How are you doing over there yonder? You headin’ west, too?”

  And I’d answer: “I feel like I’m coming down with something. I don’t know, I got a headache and chills and I feel weak and listless. You got a thermometer with you? Is saltpeter supposed to be good for this? You think maybe I should bleed myself?”

  And they’d lope over near me and ask if I had a fever. “You’re supposed to starve a fever,” they said. “Just lie there and rest and don’t eat anything and pretty soon you’ll feel better.”

  • • •

  And I did that, and three days later I died. The vultures came and feasted off me and the dogs fought over my bones and some old bum came and took the $34,000 in twenty-dollar bills out of my saddlebags and stomped on my china set and pretty soon what was left of me lay bleached and white on the lone prairie, but I didn’t care because I was in heaven. I assume it was heaven. It was like Brown’s Hotel in Denver, a suite, with a bathtub eight feet long, and a canopied bed, and an angel to bring me my breakfast.

  It’s a good breakfast: fresh biscuits and butter and two strips of thick crisp bacon and two eggs soft poached and fried potatoes and all of it on a beautiful pale blue Amaryllis plate. But it does not vary from day to day, and neither does the angel, who sings beautifully but always the same song.

  It is perfect here and a person should be grateful, I reckon, but I am about fed up with it and ready to move on to the other place, if only I could think of something bad enough to say that would get me sent there, and, being a cowboy, I suppose, that won’t be a problem. Something will come to mind.

  5.

  THE BABE

  Back when I was twenty-four, I pitched up at Time-Life Inc. in its forty-eight-story box headquarters on Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, one more desperate job applicant, and was directed to Sports Illustrated, where a kindly woman named Honor Fitzpatrick looked at my writing samples and gently discouraged me. “Your talent is for fiction,” she said. “The only opening I have is for a fact-checker. I don’t think you’d be happy doing that.” Discouraging at the time, but in retrospect one is grateful. Profoundly grateful. A job in that box might’ve sent me down a path that turns into a deep trench, only to awaken at age forty-eight, divorced, in a junk-ridden studio apartment on West Twenty-third where I sit night after night beating up on a clunky novel about the Midwest. Twenty years later, an editor at S.I. asked me to write something for them and of course I said yes—I took it as corporate capitulation—and wrote a piece of fiction.

  Our Lake Wobegon teams did not do well last year, the Whippets with no pitching finishing dead last, the Leonards pitiful and helpless in the fall even with a 230-pounder to center the offensive line, and now it’s basketball season again and already the boys are getting accustomed to defeat. When they ran out on the floor for the opener versus Bowlus (who won 58–21), they looked pale and cold in their blue-and-gold silks, and Buddy had the custodian turn up the heat, but it was too late. These boys looked like they were on death row, they trembled as their names were announced.

  It’s not defeat per se that hurts so much, we’re used to that; it’s the sense of doom and submission to fate that is awful. When the 230-pounder centered the ball and it stuck between his tremendous thighs and he toppled forward to be plundered by the Bisons, it was, I’m sure, with a terrible knowledge in his heart that he had this debacle coming to him and it was useless to resist. Two of the basketball players are sons of players on the fabled 1958 squad that was supposed to win the state championship and put our town on the map, but while we looked forward to that glorious weekend our team was eliminated in the first round by St. Klaus. None of us ever recovered from that disappointment. But do our children have to suffer from it too?

  As Harry (Can O’Corn) Knudsen wrote: “In the game of life we’re playing, people now are saying that the aim of it is friendship and trust. I wish that it were true but it seems, for me and you, that someone always loses and it’s us.”

  Can O’s inspiration came from playing eleven years for the Whippets, a humbling experience for anyone. The team is getting trounced, pummeled, whipped, and Dutch says, “Come on, guys, you’re too tense out there, it’s a game, go out there and have fun,” and you think, This is fun? If this is fun, then sic your dogs on me, let them chew me for a while, that’d be pure pleasure. But out you trot to right field feeling heavyhearted and not even sure you’re trotting correctly so you adjust the trot and your left foot grabs your right, you trip on your own feet, and down you go like a sack of potatoes and the fans in the stands are doubled up gasping and choking, and you have dirt in your mouth that you’ll taste for years—is this experience good for a person?

  Some fans have been led to wonder if maybe our Lake Wobegon athletes are suffering from a Christian upbringing that stresses the unworthiness angle and is light on the aspect of grace. How else would boys of sixteen and seventeen get the feeling that they were born to lose, if not in Bible class? And the uneasiness our boys have felt about winning—a fan can recall dozens of nights when the locals had a good first half, opened a nice lead, began to feel the opponents’ pain, and sympathized and lightened up and wound up giving away their lunch. Does this come from misreading the Gospels?

  Little Jimmy Wahlberg used to sit in the dugout and preach to the Whippets between innings, using the score of the ball game to quote Scripture; e.g., John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” or Matthew 4:4: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” That was fine except when he was pitching. God had never granted Little Jimmy’s prayer request for a good curveball, so this fine Christian boy got shelled like a peanut whenever he took the mound, and one day Ronnie Decker came back to the bench after an eternal inning in centerfield and said, “First Revelations 13:0: Keep the ball down and throw at their heads.”

  Ronnie is Catholic, and they have more taste for blood, it seems. (Was there ever a Methodist bullfighter?) In St. Klaus, the ladies chant, “Make ’em sing and make ’em dance / Kick ’em in the nuts and step on their hands.” The boys are ugly brutes with raw sores on their arms and legs and with little ball-bearing eyes, who will try to hurt you. A gang of men stands by the backstop, drinking beer and talking to the umpire, a clean-cut Lutheran boy named Fred. Fred knows that, the week before, Carlson called a third strike on a Klausie, dashed to his car, the men rocked it and let the air out of the tires but couldn’t pry the hood open and disconnect the spark plugs before he started up and rode away on the rims. Fred hopes to keep the fans happy.

  For a Golden Age of Lake Wobegon sports, you’d have to go back to the forties. The town ball club was the Lake Wobegon Schroeders, so
named because the starting nine were brothers, sons of E. J. Schroeder. Nine big strapping boys with identical mops of black hair, big beaks, little chins, and so shy they couldn’t look you in the eye, and E.J. was the manager, though the boys were such fine ballplayers, he only sat in the shade on a white kitchen chair and grumbled at them, they didn’t require management.

  E.J. was ticked off if a boy hit a bad pitch. He’d spit and curse and rail at him, and then R.J.’d go up and pound one out of the park (making the score 11–zip) and circle the bases and the old man’d say, “Boy, he put the old apple right down the middle, didn’t he? Blind man coulda hit that one. Your gramma coulda put the wood on that one. If a guy couldn’t hit that one out, there’d be something wrong with him, I’d say. Wind practically took that one out of here, didn’t even need to hit it much”—and lean over and spit. When the Schroeders were winning every game, E.J. bitched about how they won.

  “Why’dja throw to first for, ya dummy?”

  “But it’s the third out, Dad. We won the game.”

  “I know that. You don’t have to point that out to me. Why’ntcha get the guy at third?”

  “It was easier to go to first.”

  “Easier! Easier??!!”

  The tenth son, Paul, had a gimpy right leg but still tried to please his dad and sat in the dugout and kept statistics (1.29, for example, and .452 and .992), but E.J. never looked at them. “That’s history,” he said, spitting, “I am interested in the here and now.”

  So his sons could never please him, and if they did, he forgot about it. Once, against Freeport, his oldest boy, Edwin Jim, Jr., turned and ran to the centerfield fence for a long long long fly ball and threw his glove forty feet in the air to snag the ball and caught the ball and glove and turned toward the dugout to see if his dad had seen it, and E.J. was on his feet clapping, but when he saw the boy look to him, he immediately pretended he was swatting mosquitoes. The batter was called out, the third out. Jim ran back to the bench and stood by his dad. E.J. sat chewing in silence and fnally he said, “I saw a man in Superior, Wisconsin, do that a long time ago but he did it at night and the ball was hit a lot harder.”